Monday, March 10, 2014

Film Atlas (Hong Kong): The Boxer's Omen

Country: Hong
Kong

Film: The Boxer's
Omen / Mo (1983)

The film opens with a kickboxing match (enjoy it, because despite the misleading title this is the second-to-last boxing scene) between a Thai and Hong Kong fighter, the latter of
which is paralyzed for life despite winning, due to some shockingly poor
sportsmanship.

The boxer's brother Hung, a crime boss, is back home getting ambushed by
nameless thugs, but he's saved by a the vision of a sprinkler-wielding Buddha.

After some hot sex, Hung heads to Thailand to avenge his brother, but is drawn
into a Buddhist monastery where a prophecy foretells his rescue of their cursed
abbot (his twin from a previous life) from an evil Caribbean witchdoctor. After
being initiated as a monk, a process that involves getting covered in leeches
and bursting out of a giant urn, he faces off against the black magic of his
nemesis, who summons bats out of crocodile skulls and tears off his own head (a
more effective strategy than you might think). Hung victoriously returns to his
apartment where his girlfriend is nonchalantly showering; oddly, she is more
surprised by his shaved head than his unannounced three-month absence. He tells
her he has seen through the vanity of the world and then they have more sex,
which is kind of a no-no for monks, so he ends up losing his powers and his
grudge match against the Thai jerk (remember him?). Meanwhile, the witchdoctor
has resurrected a zombie-mummy-vampire lady through a maggoty ceremony both
bizarre and disgusting. Hung prepares for their inevitable rematch by
harvesting a sacred mushroom from an enormous stone face. The final showdown takes
place at a temple guarded by godlike statues where even stranger things happen
and if your eyes don't melt first, your brain probably will.

The plot summary of Boxer's Omen reads like the transcript of a
fever-racked 15-year-old channel-flipping at 2am while on psychotropic drugs,
but director Chih-Hung Kuei's boundless energy, whiplash genre changes and
manic outpouring of disjointed ideas are an absolute riot. And if you can't
follow the plot at a given moment, that's OK too, because the next crazily
unpredictable but whimsically inventive shot (including lots of prismatic
lenses, dubiously authentic religious ceremonies and a brief travelogue in
Nepal) is already bearing down on you to ensure there's never a dull moment. Though
the film makes use of a couple awesomely cheesy digital effects (the best being
the writhing script of Buddhist mantras flowing over Hung's meditating
muscles), it's strongest element is its horror-themed practical effects which
feature stop-motion sequences of magic spiders and bats, a disembodied heads
that straggles with its viscera tentacles, a skinless organ-bearing artery-suit
and miniature animatronic cyclops-dinosaurs that shoot lasers. A warning
though: Boxer's Omen is not for everyone (as you can doubtlessly already tell),
and least of all for those with a weak stomach. There's copious violence and nudity and gratuitous gross-out scenes (vomiting up a moray eel being one of the more straightforward example) along with other good-natured indecencies.